Prototype manufacturing of large tritium target for DT neutron source inside JAEA

Abe, Yuichi; Tanaka, Shigeru; Oginuma, Yoshikazu; Kawabe, Masaru*; Yamada, Masayuki; Suzuki, Takumi; Yamanishi, Toshihiko; Konno, Chikara  

We succeeded in producing a large tritium target for Fusion Neutronics Source (FNS) inside JAEA. The large tritium target is produced by absorbing tritium in an evaporated thin titanium layer on disk-shaped copper-alloy substrate. It is essential to remove out-gases, particularly humidity, from the titanium layer and substrate because out-gases block the tritium absorption. We developed an adsorption chamber and we found out a condition for the tritium adsorption through many deuterium adsorption tests to the titanium instead of tritium. The tritium adsorption chamber is installed in the glove box of Tritium Processing Laboratory (TPL), and we manufactured a large tritium target. The amount of the adsorbed tritium of the large target was about 26 TBq, and the initial DT neutron generation rate was 1.710n/sec/mA. This performance was very good compared with commercial based large tritium targets.